Betting on Tools that Power Blogs

Olga Kharif of BusinessWeek wrote about the companies building weblog tools and the venture capital that follows. Ask David Sifry when his little San Francisco startup called Technorati will turn a profit, and he laughs contagiously. No, Technorati, which tracks Web logs, or blogs, and will soon offer blog searches, is a long way from turning a profit. But it has big-league venture-capital backers like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital, and they’re willing to wait as blog entrepreneurs cast around for a good business model….

Technorati changes

Technorati is no longer just phrase search! Technorati launched new features and a new redesign today. A new feature still in testing is a feed with enclosures of the top 20 MP3 references in the blogosphere. Dave also claims they have better blogroll detection. They fixed the Developer’s Wiki and I can finally login again. Technorati also announced a $3250 developer’s contest ending December 31. A lot to announce all at once! I noticed there are no advertisements on the search results page. Could be unintentional but an interesting change….

Technorati trademarks

On August 26, 2004 Technorati filed a trademark application for “attention index” (serial number 78474374). This move shows Technorati is serious enough about Attention.xml to file a trademark application with the Patent Office. Technorati also has a Goodpoint trademark about to clear. I have no idea what the significance of that trademark is about but it was filed while Krisztina Mendonca (GoodPoint Web Design) was doing contract design work for Technorati….

Technorati open house

Tonight was the Technorati open house at their new offices near SBC Park. The event was catered and drew a large crowd. You can check out pictures from the event. There were many new Technorati employees I had not seen before, including Jason DeFillipo, who is currently working as a contractor for Technorati’s new search functions. That’s right, Technorati is not just phrase search any more. They have new boolean features and will show search results from not just the last week. The new features should be announced any day now. It will be interesting to see how their servers…

Technorati Party October 28

Technorati is throwing a party next Thursday, October 28, at their new office space near SBC Park in San Francisco. The new office is within walking distance of the N Judah and CalTrain train stops. Free beer, WiFi, food, and interesting people….

Technorati Sherlock Mozilla search plugin

I just finished writing a Sherlock/Mozilla plugin for Technorati (zip, gzip). Although my sidebar item code works in simulation it breaks in Mozilla 1.7.3 and Mozilla 1.8 alpha 4. The same sidebar sends my next results code to Ask Jeeves for some odd reason as well. Unzip the archive to your “searchplugins” directory under the Mozilla or Firefox parent directory. You should have two files: the source and a PNG image. To make Technorati your default search engine in Mozilla you need to select it from the drop-down list under Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Internet Search. Once you…

Technorati Hackathon reflections

Last night Technorati held a Hackathon at their new offices near SBC Park. There were about 30 people in attendance including the Technorati crew. Some remote users joined via IRC. Good pizza, the beer did not run out, and the salad was almost untouched. Thanks to Liz Westover for putting together the event. Dave and Tantek spoke about Technorati and its APIs. We went around the room and introduced ourselves and our interests related to Technorati and the hackathon. Ideas were thrown on the whiteboard but by the end of the introductions no one was interested in splitting up into…

Technorati Hackathon

Technorati is hosting a hackathon next Wednesday starting at 7 p.m. in their new offices in San Francisco. Parking should be ample. If you take the N Judah to SBC Park (3rd and King) Technorati’s office is a one block walk. Tantek extends an invitation to web designers and web developers. it’s not just a night of API developers. I created a wiki page on the developers site to track topics. I would like to work on a RSS aggregator plugin that sorts feeds by source authority. Anyone else interested in such a project and would like to collaborate?…